A physical, real city overlaid with a representation of a digital city, which includes three-dimensional depictions of buildings.

Focus on digital twins

Our March issue includes a Focus that highlights the state of the art, challenges, and opportunities in the development and use of digital twins across different domains.

Announcements

  • A physical, real city overlaid with a representation of a digital city, which includes three-dimensional depictions of buildings.

    There has been a growing interest and enthusiasm in using digital twins to accelerate scientific discovery and to help researchers and stakeholders with critical decision-making tasks. Check out our Focus that highlights the state of the art, challenges, and opportunities in the development and use of digital twins across different domains.

  • A female researcher working in a lab with a microscope and a laptop.

    To celebrate Ada Lovelace Day, we talked to some (of the many) female researchers about their work, gender disparity in STEM, and the steps we can take to overcome these challenges.

  • An image that echoes the SDG logo and integrates the idea of analysis of data from the various goals.

    The year 2023 marks the mid-point of the 15-year period envisaged to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals. In this Nature Portfolio Collection, you will find studies across different journals that assess progress or that showcase interventions that have made a difference. We also welcome submissions of studies framed in a similar way.

    Open for submissions
  • A plant growing out of a circuit board, representing computational tools’ promise for enabling a greener future.

    Check out our Focus that highlights the potential for computational tools to help address environmental challenges, including experts’ opinions on how these tools themselves can be improved to ensure a greener and more sustainable future.

Nature Computational Science is a Transformative Journal; authors can publish using the traditional publishing route OR via immediate gold Open Access.

Our Open Access option complies with funder and institutional requirements.

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  • Digital twins hold immense promise in accelerating scientific discovery, but the publicity currently outweighs the evidence base of success. We summarize key research opportunities in the computational sciences to enable digital twin technologies, as identified by a recent National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine consensus study report.

    • Karen Willcox
    • Brittany Segundo
    Comment
  • Digital twins of Earth have the capability to offer versatile access to detailed information on our changing world, helping societies to adapt to climate change and to manage the effects of local impacts, globally. Nevertheless, human interaction with digital twins requires advances in computational science, particularly where complex geophysical data is turned into information to support decision making.

    • Peter Bauer
    • Torsten Hoefler
    • Wilco Hazeleger
    Comment
  • Urban digital twins hold immense promise as live computational models of cities, synthesizing diverse knowledge, streaming data, and supporting decisions towards more inclusive planning and policy. The size, heterogeneity, and open-ended character of cities, however, pose many difficult questions, at the frontiers of what is currently possible in computational science. Overcoming these challenges provides pathways for fundamental progress in the field and a proving ground for its economic value and social relevance.

    • Luís M. A. Bettencourt
    Comment
  • Dr Zhimei Sun – professor of Materials Science and Engineering at Beihang University – talks to Nature Computational Science about her career trajectory, her research on computational materials science and materials informatics, as well as her advice to young women scientists in these fields.

    • Jie Pan
    Q&A
  • We discuss the different formats for publishing non-primary research that are currently supported by Nature Computational Science.

    Editorial